The government is mulling the establishment of a new car assessment program, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) said yesterday, adding that the Vehicle Safety Certification Center is assessing ways such a program might be enforced.
The ministry issued the statement after the brakes of a concrete pumping truck on Wednesday apparently failed while it was going down Yangmingshan’s (陽明山) Yangde Boulevard, causing it to crash into oncoming traffic, killing four people and injuring nine.
Following the accident, writer Huang Shao-bo (黃邵博) published an opinion piece in the Chinese-language Business Weekly accusing the ministry of not caring about people’s lives.
Huang said that other nations promulgate new car assessment programs to protect their consumers, but Taiwanese learn about the importance of vehicle safety by repeatedly conducting collision experiments “with their lives.”
The ministry said that Taiwan has had a vehicle safety inspection system since 1998, adding that the EU, Japan, Australia and other countries put into place similar regulations in the same year.
Since 2006, Taiwan has also fine-tuned its vehicle safety regulations so they are now in sync with those stipulated by the UN Economic Commissions for Europe, the ministry said.
In addition, Article 63 of the Highway Act (公路法) requires vehicles to pass safety certification tests before they can be registered, the ministry said, adding that small passenger vehicles must meet the standards set for 59 test items to pass.
The nation’s inspection standards for vehicle collision tests are based on the UN’s regulations on the protection of occupants in frontal or lateral collisions, the ministry said.
According to the ministry, the EU is to enforce regulations preventing fire risks caused by rear-end collisions as well as rules on the vehicle restraint system in frontal and side impacts, adding that the regulations would not be enforced until next year and 2020 respectively.
Taiwan also plans to implement similar regulations soon, the ministry said, adding that the date of enforcement would be announced after the Vehicle Safety Certification Center completes discussions on both types of regulations next month.
The European New Car Assessment Program (Euro-NCAP) and vehicle safety inspection system in the EU are completely different systems, the ministry said.
While the European Commission mandates that all cars in the EU pass safety inspections before they are licensed, the Euro-NCAP is an independent program backed by the EU, it said.
However, the Euro-NCAP is a voluntary vehicle safety rating system as the standards in the program are stricter than vehicle inspection criteria set by the European Commission, it said.
Therefore, the Euro-NCAP program is often used to evaluate some popular car types, the ministry said, adding that results of the evaluation are then converted into “star grades” that can be used by consumers as a reference.
The ministry said that the Euro-NCAP rating is only one of nine similar programs enforced around the world.
Should the nation choose to enforce the Euro-NCAP system, it would need to build a new laboratory to conduct the tests, the ministry said.
“We are working with the Vehicle Safety Certification Center to establish a new car assessment program, including the items to be tested, the agency to enforce the program and the source of funding,” the ministry said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater